At five in the afternoon in November, the yard of a logistics site falls into darkness while the rotations continue. Forklift drivers move between the trailers, lorry drivers climb down from their cabs, production teams reach the car park by the same walkway, and the outdoor lighting dates from the time when activity stopped with daylight.
The surroundings of a site concentrate risks that the inside of the building does not have: moving vehicles, blind spots, changes in level, bad weather. They are handled zone by zone, with requirements that differ from one zone to another.
Three outdoor zones, three different requirements
The EN 12464-2 standard deals with outdoor workplaces and distinguishes activities according to their visual requirement. A typical industrial site is analysed from three zones, each calling for a different decisive quantity.
Outdoor zone | What the lighting must allow | Decisive quantity |
|---|---|---|
Manoeuvring yard | Seeing a pedestrian, a bollard or a load on the ground while reversing | Uniformity and no shadow areas |
Loading dock | Reading a label, checking a parcel, working inside the trailer | Vertical illuminance and dedicated dock lighting |
Pedestrian walkway | Being seen by a vehicle driver and identifying an obstacle on the ground | Vertical illuminance and continuity of the route |
This zone-by-zone reading avoids the most expensive reflex: installing a few high-power floodlights on the gable of the building and hoping to cover everything. Such an arrangement dazzles drivers, leaves the foot of the building in shadow and disturbs neighbours.
Manoeuvring yard: uniformity and removing shadow areas
A manoeuvring yard depends on uniformity, not on the maximum level. The danger lies in contrasts: a driver reversing sees the lit area behind him properly and can no longer make anything out in the dark band between two beams.
Parked trailers also create moving masks. Lighting coming from a single direction produces behind each vehicle a shadow several metres long, in which a pedestrian disappears completely.
The remedy consists of crossing the beams from several directions, placing the columns around the edge of the manoeuvring area rather than at a single point. The mounting height is then chosen to cover the area with a reasonable number of points while keeping an angle of incidence that limits direct glare.
Loading docks: vertical illuminance and the inside of the trailer
The dock is the most demanding point of the site. The operator reads labels there, checks the condition of parcels, inspects load securing, and all these tasks are done on vertical surfaces, not on the ground.
Added to this is a contrast difficulty. A properly lit dock opening onto an unlit trailer creates an abrupt transition: the eye, adapted to the level of the dock, can make nothing out in the volume of the trailer for several seconds.
The treatment involves lighting dedicated to the dock position, often on an articulated arm, able to reach into the volume of the trailer, in addition to the general lighting of the facade. This reasoning matches the one applied to vertical illuminance in warehouses, where reading the racks matters more than the level on the floor.
Pedestrian walkways and crossing points with vehicles
The pedestrian walkway needs little light on the ground but a great deal of continuity. A succession of lit areas and black areas causes more accidents than a modest but regular level, because it prevents the eye from adapting.
The priority is to make the pedestrian visible, and therefore to light their silhouette from the front and not just the ground under their feet. A high-visibility vest only plays its role if it receives light, which requires a sufficient vertical component along the route.
Crossing points between pedestrian flows and vehicle flows are treated as special zones: local increase in level, floor markings legible under artificial light, removal of the masks created by outdoor storage.
Glare for drivers and neighbours
A badly aimed floodlight produces three unwanted effects at once: it dazzles drivers who have it in their field of view, it sends light beyond the property boundaries and it lights the sky for no purpose.
Tilt is the decisive parameter. A floodlight tilted up too far loses efficiency on the target area and gains in nuisance, whereas an asymmetric optic mounted flat lights the useful surface while keeping the sources out of the direct field of view.
Sites near housing also fall under the order of 27 December 2018 on light nuisance, which governs the share of flux emitted above the horizontal and the colour temperature of outdoor installations. This point is checked at the data sheet stage, before ordering.
Sealing, corrosion and wind resistance
An outdoor site luminaire endures driving rain, frost, splashes of de-icing salt and sometimes an atmosphere loaded with dust or aggressive compounds. The protection rating against water and dust is a minimum, but it says nothing about how the housing will hold up over time.
The corrosivity class of the site guides the choice of materials, surface treatments and fasteners. A coastal site or a platform next to a surface treatment workshop is handled with higher requirements than an ordinary business park.
Finally, a floodlight catches the wind. Its exposed surface enters into the sizing of the column and its foundation, and adding floodlights to an existing column is not decided without checking this compatibility.
Control: astronomical clock, detection or dimming
The three zones do not have the same need for availability. The manoeuvring yard must be at level during rotations, the dock during loading slots, the pedestrian walkway during shift changes.
An astronomical clock sets the switching on the real sunrise and sunset times throughout the year, without the drift caused by a dirty photocell. It is combined with sub-zones controlled separately, and with detection on little-used walkways.
This division is built from the real operating hours, recorded during the visit, then checked by calculation as in our other lighting solutions by sector of activity. A photometric study of the surroundings makes it possible to test the layout of the columns and the aiming of the floodlights before any civil engineering. On the equipment side, the ranges of LED floodlights and luminaires for traffic routes cover these three zones.
To have your surroundings surveyed and the layout tested before the works, request a site visit.
